Online Experience Readefined

Every once in a while, in the mornings, I allocate some time to reading Adobe blogs (that’s after I’ve skimmed the news places and am not indulgently and therefore guiltily absorbing myself in the New Yorker). Believe it or not, I consider it a worthwhile activity. Come to think of it, reading as such is a highly worthwhile activity. More than that, there are people who seem to be in sync with how I feel (gasp!). And here I mean not the reading one occasionally blurts out when they have nothing particular to say concerning what they are up to in their rare leisure hours, but actual reading. Even if that refers to the weird mobile device activity some practice in the subway.

Wait, this is not the path the rambling is supposed to follow. Anyway, a couple of days ago my Adobe blog morning starts with a re-post with this note at the top:

“This is a mirror of http://anirudhs.chaosnet.org/blog/2009.09.01.html which has been down due to too much traffic.”

That’s where I start smelling good news I’ve been oblivious of for the unforgivable several days. That’s also where I get more grounding for the whole people-in-sync idea because it’s all about this brand-new Readefine tool – another hello from Flex 4 and Text Layout Framework in particular.

Readefine is a content beautifier app – it works with plain text, RSS and HTML alike (well, not that completely alike right now, since certain HTML is capable of bringing the app to a complete halt; pending to be resolved). What the app essentially aims at is making reading off the screen much easier by organizing the text, laying it out in columns, prioritizing pagination over scrolling and applying nicer, typeset-style fonts to it. Readefine’s creator, Anirudh Sasikumar, highly welcomes feedback. For now, there’s only a web-based version available, but in the future Readefine will be available on the desktop as well.

Anyway, what has made the framework possible asks for some of the spotlight, too. In brief, TLF (a very transparent explanation is to be found in this slideshow) is Adobe’s high-level implementation of FTE (the Flash Text Engine, created by InDesign team).The framework is written in ActionScript and has sprouted components for both Flash CS4 and Flex 3.2/4. Naturally, it is extensible and modifiable – we’ll be able to see the new components used to craft Readefine open-sourced sometime soon. Which reminds me, TLF itself, along with OSMF (Open Source Media Framework) was moved to open source as recently as in late July this year in as yet another step towards an open Flash platform. TLF supports multiple languages and aspires to bring “print-quality typography to the web”.